I first read Eliot when I was at school. I came to the anti-semitic poems shortly after reading The Waste Land. With the exception of "Gerontion", these earlier poems struck me as mean-spirited and malicious. I was upset, and surprised; they were not what I had expected. I had been captivated by The Waste Land.

It was not until I was 30 that I returned to these poems. By then I had completed an English literature degree at Cambridge, which had exposed me to literary critical practices and preconceptions that in the aggregate tended to promote the ideals of the disinterested reader and the self-subsisting poem. While the reader who brought his prejudices to the poem misread it, if the poem itself endeavoured to persuade the reader of anything, it was something less than a fully realised literary work. This, at any rate, was the received doctrine.

It meant both that Jews might misread poems as anti-semitic and that anti-semites might versify their prejudices. But while, in some notional way, it was thus conceded that poetry might be anti-semitic, it seemed unthinkable that this could be true of Eliot's work. It was much more likely that the Jews who found it to be anti-semitic were just misreading it. Perhaps these readers were a little over-sensitive to the possibility of insult or affront.

Whenever such misreadings were advanced, usually by readers outside the universities, they would be met with a swift, and decisive, put-down. These interpretations of the poetry were too limitedly Jewish, and culpably insensitive to the specific properties of poetry (or so it was implied). I went along with this for some time, and gave little thought to something that had seemed to me, on my first exposure to Eliot, to be an immense problem.

It was a book that mentioned Eliot only in passing that brought me back to his anti-semitism. In Bernard Lewis's Semites and Anti-semites (1986), a chapter bearing the simple, damning title "Anti-semites", characterised Eliot as a typical Jew-hater, quoting lines from a poem that places rats underneath piles, and "the jew" underneath the lot.

My immediate reaction was that this judgment was too perfunctory, and that it was unjust. I felt this even though I too had once been troubled by Eliot's anti-semitic poetry. Hence the research project that became my book, TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form. I wanted to demonstrate that Lewis was mistaken. Five years on, in 1995, with the book completed, I still believed Lewis to be wrong, though for a very different reason.

Eliot was not a typical anti-semite. He was instead an extraordinary anti-semite. He did not reflect the anti-semitism of his times, he contributed to it, even enlarged it. And with these poems he exhausted anti-semitism's (very modest) poetry-making reserves. So he did not persist in his anti-semitism as a poet. He did not repeat himself in this way.

Implicit in his poetry there is indeed an aesthetic judgment that anti-semitism must be enabling, and when not, is absolutely to be prohibited. I believe that by as early as 1922, anti-semitism had ceased to be a resource for Eliot's poetic imagination. And so he abandoned it, though he continued to draw on anti-semitic themes in his critical prose.

The conclusion startled me, even as I was reaching it. Still, while the direction of the book's argument changed over the period of writing and research, what remained constant was the conviction that the question of Eliot's anti-semitism mattered. It needed to be addressed, in the proper detail. However, this was not the consensus view. Most critical studies neglected this aspect of the work.

One critic, for example, in a very patient, and indeed in every respect but one a positively scrupulous, reading of one of Eliot's anti-semitic poems, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," glancingly commented, "the question whether [it is] anti-semitic is obviously not a pressing one". Well it was pressing to me, and, as I thought, it was likely to be pressing for many other readers too - and not only Jewish readers.

What is more, I also thought that the question ought to be pressing for all readers of Eliot's poetry, without limitation. I did not - do not - quite understand how some are able to contemplate his anti-semitism with indifference. It seems to me to be a failure of moral imagination, and of interpretation too.

This does not mean that I read Eliot's poems as anti-semitic statements by their author. I do not read them and then conclude: this is what Eliot thought. Instead, I read them as being in themselves anti-semitic. I am referring here, of course, only to the five poems that I identify in the book as anti-semitic, not the whole of Eliot's poetic output. These are the poems: "Burbank," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "A Cooking Egg," and the posthumously published "Dirge". I regard Eliot's purpose in writing them to be the exploitation of anti-semitic discourse, a view of them consistent with their limited number, and with the comprehensiveness of their address of anti-semitic preoccupations. Eliot's offence lies in his willingness to give offence, in his deployment of anti-semitic language. Eliot's anti-semitic poetry is very deft. In "Gerontion" he writes:

"My house is a decayed house,

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London."

The poem "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" disavows the anti-semitic fantasy of Jewish conspiracy. It both adopts and also limits anti-semitism, and is the most poised of all Eliot's anti-semitic poems (which is saying a great deal). It steers a course along the very line that separates mockery of the vulgarity of anti-semitism and mockery of a vulgar (because unnerved, and overstated) version of anti-semitism.

Anti-semitism is not a discourse rich in literary possibilities. Those who draw on it mostly produce dross. But Eliot's poems are inventive and resourceful and display his mastery over a heterogeneous mass of material. These poems are derived from a cluster of clichés, conventions exhausted by over-exposure. With great virtuosity, Eliot turns this material into art. He compresses anti-semitism into powerfully charged language, and thereby restores something of its menace and resonance.

His poetry is one of anti-semitism's few literary triumphs.

The book was read by some of my more hostile readers merely as an attack on Eliot, and an attempt to denigrate him. This dismayed me; it was not my intention to damage his reputation. It did not occur to me that there might still be serious disagreement about the anti-semitic nature of parts of his work.

One friendly reviewer of the book commented, "no one has ever doubted TS Eliot's anti-semitism". He was wrong. Many of my more hostile readers doubted precisely that, or held that I had overstated the anti-semitism in Eliot's work.

It was said against me that by describing Eliot as an anti-semite I was implicating him in projects of terror and murder. This was taken to be terribly unfair to Eliot. The holding of anti-semitic views has become more culpable since the second world war, apparently. This is partly because it is thought the Holocaust for the first time exposed the extent of anti-semitism's capacity to harm Jews, and partly because anti-semitism is no longer a general feature of the times. It is now a personal decision and not a prejudice unavoidably "in the air".

I think this is wrong. Anti-semitism continues to contribute to the general "climate". It has not dwindled to a marginal, limited phenomenon. Anti-semitic propaganda is in global circulation, both on the internet and in printed form. Israel's very right to exist is routinely challenged and the project of Jewish self-determination denied. It is the wish of many to deny to Jews those collective rights freely given to others (or urged for them). Jews are still being killed for the fantasy offence of being Jewish. Moral resolution is still required if one is not going to adopt anti-semitic positions.

It is a resolution that the most surprising people, in the most surprising of contexts, continue to find themselves unable to show - I am thinking, for example, of the recently reported remarks of Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who said Tony Blair had been "unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers".

To describe a person as anti-semitic is not to imply that he endorses the crimes of the Nazis, still less is it to imply that he would be capable of committing them himself. It is to imply, however, that he is careless about the consequences of anti-semitic positions held by others, and that he lacks the imagination to grasp where Jew hatred may lead. Anti-semitism encompasses both drawing-room condescensions and forest shootings. The drawing room anti-semite is not a murderer, but he is an anti-semite.

Independently of the literary opportunities it offered to him, my guess is that Eliot was drawn both to anti-semitism's vulgarities and to its snobberies. He enjoyed ribaldry about Jews; he took comfort in contempt for Jews. He was insensitive to Jewish suffering. Anti-semitism was an aspect of a number of men whom he admired, too. But his was an anti-semitism that was also compatible with cordial relations with individual Jews.

Eliot's anti-semitic poetry is deeply troubling. Writing my book, I was searching for a way of respecting its integrity while recognising its ugliness. I imagined a Jewish reader pushing one of Eliot's Jew-despising poems away, affronted. I asked myself, how can this reader be persuaded to return to it?

I propose an adversarial stance. One maintains one's relation with the work, but argues with it. This is not a prosecutorial reading, but it is one that acknowledges the offence to the reader. It does not suppress the offence, or wish it away. But nor does it reject the work. Indifference to offence given by these poems is a failure of interpretation. They insult Jews, I argue. To ignore these insults is to misread the poems. And if one is addressed as a Jew, isn't it reasonable to respond as one?

We ought not to seek to outlaw Eliot's poems, but neither can we submit to them. We should not ban them; but we must not abandon ourselves to them. Instead we must contest that poetry, with strategies that acknowledge both its value and its menace.

Refusing either to acquiesce in, or to rail at, Eliot's contempt for Jews, one strives to do justice to the many injustices Eliot does to Jews. This is what adversarial reading allows. It is an alternative to two kinds of silence: the coercive silence of censorship, the passive silence of the submissive reader. It combines resistance with respect.

A new edition of TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form by Anthony Julius, with a new preface by the author, is published by Thames & Hudson.